Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“Come on back and sit down,” he said wearily.

Sergeant Don Murphy sighed. “Before you get your hopes up, I want you to understand a few things. You know much about Wright City?”

Harry shook his head. “I’ve only been here six weeks.”

“Well, it’s a wide-open town, if you know what that means.”

“You mean gambling and such stuff? I know that much, because you can’t walk into a tavern, drug store or filling station without stumbling over a one-armed bandit. And I’ve heard the fellows at work talk about gambling houses, though I’ve never been to one. You mean it’s wide open—like Reno and Las Vegas?”

“I mean wide open like Wright City. In Reno and Las Vegas gambling is legal. Here it couldn’t operate without a powerful and crooked city administration behind it. And gambling is only one of the things that make it a wide open town. We’ve got ninety-four fleabag hotels where anything goes, and at least two dozen retail outlets for marijuana and heroin. The city is rotten with graft from the mayor on down, with the sole exception of the Homicide Squad. Lieutenant George Blair is our boss, and there hasn’t yet been enough money minted to fix him. Otherwise the whole city is crooked. The mayor himself is only a figurehead for Big John Gault, who runs the whole shebang.”

“I’ve heard of Big John,” Harry said. “But I thought he was just some kind of politician. A couple of guys at work seem to take a kind of pride in knowing him casually. I remember one fellow bragging that he had Big John’s unlisted phone number and no cop could ever nail him on a traffic violation. He said all he had to do was mention the number, and the cop would apologize for bothering him.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said bitterly. “Half the people in town know Big John casually, and every one of them is proud of it. John Gault is a professional glad-hander. He passes out that unlisted number like most politicians pass out cigars, and it actually is a password to kill traffic tickets. It makes everybody who has it feel like a little big shot because he is a personal friend of Big John’s. Just one of the many smooth techniques Gault uses to keep himself entrenched.”

“You think this Big John might have something to do with this?”

“Hardly likely,” Murphy said. “But Joe Murphree is one of his boys, and if Joe is mixed up in it, somebody with real weight is giving orders. That means the minute they suspect I’m moving in, Lieutenant Blair will get instructions from the commissioner to keep his cops on homicide cases. And I’ll get jerked on the carpet. You’ll have to do the leg work. I’ll tell you what I want, and when you get it, either bring it to me or phone it to me.”

“That’s fair enough,” Harry said. “If you can just tell me what to do. I haven’t the faintest idea where to start.”

“You can start by convincing me you actually had a wife,” Murphy told him. “For all I know, you’re a crackpot, and I’m not wasting my off-duty time until I know different.”

“But how can I prove it?” Harry protested. “Everybody lies.”

“Don’t you have any friends who knew you were married?”

“We haven’t had time to make friends. Helen was only here three weeks, remember. The first week, while I was working she was hunting a job, and evenings we spent hunting an apartment. The second week we both worked and evenings still hunted an apartment. When we found one a week ago, we immediately got married, and while we both continued to work, this past week was our honeymoon. Who the devil wants to make friends on a honeymoon?”

The detective’s thin lips quirked slightly at the corners. “How about the men you know at work? You must have mentioned Helen to some of them.”

Harry reddened slightly, and when Murphy simply waited for a reply, said lamely, “There’s a lot of noise. We don’t talk much.”

The detective looked incredulous.

“Well there is,” Harry said defensively. “Ajax makes fractionization units and condensers for the oil industry. My job is fit-up. They hand me a set of blueprints and a lot of steel parts, and I tack-weld them together. I have a helper, but usually he’s a different guy every day, and half the time I don’t even know his name. Even if I do, we have to talk mostly in gestures. Aside from the noise we’re making, all around us guys are using grinders and chippers, cranes are running overhead, and it’s just one constant din.”

Murphy continued to look incredulous. Harry’s blush deepened.

“Well,” he said reluctantly. “I do talk to guys at lunch time. But if you ever worked in a shop, you know how the guys are. They kid a lot. I didn’t want a lot of cracks about honeymooning.”

Murphy’s expression became more understanding. “So you never mentioned at all you were getting married?”

Harry shook his head ashamedly.

“All right. I’ll swallow that. How about the fellows who roomed at the same place you did?”

“I never got to know any of them that well,” Harry said. “Just to say hello to, of chat with a minute when we met in the hall. I doubt they even noticed I moved out.”

Murphy regarded him silently for a moment. “You’re getting harder and harder to swallow, Nolan. Where were you married?”

“At City Hall. By the record clerk.”

“Got the certificate?”

“It disappeared along with all of Helen’s stuff.”

“Got any letters she wrote? Anything at all in her handwriting?”

Harry shook his head. “I did have in the apartment, but everything except my personal stuff disappeared.” Then he thought of Dale Thompson’s private number, which Helen had written down for him, and started to reach for his wallet. He stopped the movement and smiled ruefully when he recalled Sergeant Joe Murphree had appropriated the slip. “I let your friend Murphree get away with the only sample of her handwriting I had.”

Murphy’s expressionless eyes contemplated him for a long time. Finally he said, “I’ve got an open mind on whether or not you’re a crackpot. Get down to City Hall and spend fifty cents on a certified copy of your marriage certificate. Bring me that. And you better go now, because they close at noon on Saturday.”

When Harry left the home of Sergeant Don Murphy, he felt a little cheered in spite of not having completely gained the thin detective’s confidence. At least he was starting to do something definite about finding Helen. But his cheer turned to black despair when the city clerk informed him there was no record of a marriage between Harry Nolan and Helen Lawson.

He did not know the name of the record clerk who had married them, but he prowled through City Hall from one end to the other looking into offices without spotting the man. Similarly, he was unable to recall the names of the witnesses, remembering only that they were a young couple applying for a marriage license and had been recruited from the hall by the record clerk. It gave him no satisfaction whatever to realize both names and their addresses were on the missing marriage certificate.

He phoned a report to Sergeant Murphy from a booth at City Hall.

Murphy grunted noncommittally. “Either somebody really big is behind this, or you’re an out-and-out crackpot,” he said. “Try the Midtown Employment Agency and see if they have a record of your wife’s referral to Dale Thompson.”

With dampened enthusiasm Harry took a streetcar to the Midtown Employment Agency. He was not surprised to discover the agency not only had no record of the referral, but denied ever registering a client named Helen Lawson.

Dispirited, he phoned Sergeant Murphy again. “Listen,” he said, “I can prove by people in Des Moines there is such a girl as Helen Lawson and we planned to get married. She hasn’t any parents, but we had a lot of mutual friends who knew our plans, and she has an aunt there who must have known she left Des Moines to join me.”